Bitcoins were at 24.x dollars some days ago, last time I looked they're at 19.x.. Haha.
Why not mine bitcoin2, or bitcoin3, or poopcoins, or whatever? Why are they any less valuable than bitcoins?
There's not even a widely used piece of p2p software that uses bitcoins. If there were, then why should it only accept bitcoins?
E-coins are going to have to be user-mintable. I would place a standing order at an exchange for my coins - call em Gargamailians. ( You can call yours Animats-Bucks )
My 5000 US cents held by the exchange as a standing order to buy 1 Gargamalian for 1 US cent would give my Gargamailians some value in the absence of a Gargamailian economy. I might provide services such as via a p2p protocol - perhaps offer unused hard disk space for a fee payable in Gargamailians. If I have a bunch of hardware, I might create enough demand for Gargamalians ( required to purchase services from me ) to give them substantial value. I would also have unlimited power to mint Gargamalians. If I offered a service you wanted you might offer to exchange 1 of your cents for 1 of mine ( or another exchange rate ). I might eventually trade them for US cents, or another user minted currency.
I might mint a zillion Gargamailians at the expense of their individual purchasing power. But likely nobody would want a Gargamalian except to exchange for a service I provided.
As I provided more and more services, the value of a Gargamailian might rise substantially. If I needed a burst of services from others, then I'd just mint what I needed to pay for it. Only when the value went to near zero would my ability to purchase services by exchanging Gargamalians for other users currencies be curtailed.
Smoking is expensive. If it's your lunch break, and you have $5-$8 in your pocket, you are going to choose a pack of smokes rather than the BigMac Combo meal any day.
Any 'I'm going to eat because I am bored' or 'I'm bored and lo-and-behold, it gave me the time to convince myself I was hungry' moments become smoking times instead.
However, I believe the average weight gain for quitting smoking is something like 3 pounds. Not too much.
I guess I'm less concerned if a bacteria evolves resistance to bleach, since bleach is useless as a medicine. If I get infected with a sodium hypochlorite resistant bug, then I doubt the doctor was going to prescribe me a tablespoonful of Chlorox for it anyway.
I don't buy the idea that men are turned on by women having sex with other men because it's 'how we evolved' idea.
'Cheating wives' is popular, I would guess, with married men because they can fantasize about having an affair with a 'cheating wife' supposing that she will keep the fun secret because she doesn't want to be caught either. Married women can fantasize about being the 'cheating wife'. Unmarried men can suppose that they might have a relatively string-free tryst with a 'cheating wife' who is only out for a little fun, and not have feelings of guilt about it.
All these fantasies are BS, and probably those who enjoy them are mostly aware of it. They are just stories people tell themselves to cast an aura of plausability over the whole fantasy for long enough to attain self inflicted orgasm.
Of course a real 'cheating wife' is probably in an unhappy marriage and might not give a damn if she were caught, and like any other 'other woman' might not have any interest whatsoever in keeping an affair secret. And for unmarried men, a relationship with a 'cheating wife' may easily end up with all the same strings a relationship with another woman would: You or she might fall in love - and then what?
And as for rapish fantasies I think people enjoy them for the same sorts of reasons: Usually two reasonably attractive people of the opposite sex want to have sex with each other, and would were it not for the complications involved with the act, and getting to the point where the act happens.
Rape, in a sexual fantasy is a simple backstory to have in your mind while inflicting an orgasm on yourself. Why would they be so accomodating? Rape. Why is my partner so audacious as to just do X with abandon? Rape. Fantasies about being raped or raping someone cut to the chase quite effectively.
I don't actually understand how Ooma can work at the their current rates, and $200 is really expensive for a device like that.
Here in the US, Cellphones are free since they come with your plan, I hear in Europe the phones cost a mint, but the monthly fees are lower. I have no idea what the device ought to cost ( prolly cost them $1.95 in parts ).
The instructions do recommend placing the Ooma before your router so that it can prioritize voice traffic over other traffic to ensure good quality, but I have DSL, and did not follow the instructions. I just connected it like any other device so that Ooma Phone traffic is not prioritized above other traffic. No double NAT for me. I have had no voice quality problems so far after more than a year so I saw no reason to change the way I hooked it up.
I thought this at first too, but they do have other sources of revenue besides selling devices. They offer 'fancy' extras for a fee. Also I believe their operating costs are almost zero.
No, I don't, but then I wouldn't be surprised if it's common. People have all sorts of devices that require broadband internet that aren't 'computers'. Think of Playstations, and Wiis and Roku Netflix players etc. Ooma phones are just one more device like that that uses the internet and isn't a computer.
I have an Ooma phone. Actually it's a device that plugs into my internet router, and into which you can plug regular landline phones.
It's like 15 bucks a *year* for taxes, and you get free calling in the US. No other charges. And you don't need to own a computer to use it. It's not like magic-jack where you need to have your computer running.
I also put 50 bucks in my pre-pay account, so I can use 411, and make international calls. The rates are competitive to skype rates for international calls. AND, you get a real landline phone number and can make calls to landline phone numbers. So instead of messing with a computer, when I want to make an international call, I just pick up the phone and dial. If someone calls me from another country, I tell them I'll call them back since it's cheaper for me than it would be for them.
Now the device is 200 bucks, but it's already paid for itself since I don't pay a telephone bill for a landline. And the call quality = that of any landline I've ever had.
No monthly fee. In a year, it pays for itself, and that's it. What a great deal! If you move, take your Ooma with you, and you KEEP THE SAME PHONE NUMBER no matter where you live, ( unless you want to change it ). Cell phones are nice, but they can be expensive. And if you are required to keep one for work, then having 2 in your pocket is annoying. Ooma is a way to have your OWN phone number forever for minimal money.
Why am I shilling? Because I want others to get a great deal. I don't want Ooma to go out of business because it gives customers such a good deal. ( I have no reason to suppose that it would.... ) For being such a good deal, I'll plug them once in a while.
Messaging client = just a little icon in the corner unless someone's talking to me. Email appears to me as the desktop behind my terminals unless I'm using it. I can see if I have a new message by the pop up notification. RSS? Never used it.
If Chinese culture values science/engineering more than Western culture does coming up though school, then maybe the 'winner' types end up persuing what Chinese society ( which includes the government ) values - i.e. science and engineering.
Where then would the Chinese equivalents of the 'losers and nerds' end up? Maybe other pursuits, possibly the liberal arts.
Of course the 'winners' grow up to be powerful in China as they do elsewhere, it just seems that 'winners' in China do science and engineering more than they do elsewhere probably because they offer relatively more rewards than elsewhere because they are more highly valued by the powers that be, and so everyone else because of the rewards that being valued by the powers that be confers.
You two are both right. The thing is that people live in the cracks. You want libertarian ideals and a government that tramples them sometimes. You want powerful forces played off each other to create cracks where life can take hold.
A system that works perfectly like a machine IS a machine, and as sterile, whether based on logical libertarian or logical authoritarian principles.
If your code is 80 columns wide, then there's no reason to have a terminal window wider than that. I can get 4 80x25 terminals open on a laptop with space left over or I can make one of them a full screen tall. Since my code fits in 80 columns, I have no incentive to make a terminal window wider than 80 columns. Rarely I make two windows a full screen tall to compare them side by side, but usually diff is what I use instead. Also, I try to fit all my ideas into 25 rows - 1 screenful. This is an old programming guideline that I admit to not always following, but I welcome the pain of having to resize my windows to accomodate longer procedures as a constant reminder to refactor my code.
I just have never found it necessary to look at more than 4 terminals of text at once. With alt-tab I can have a web browser and a gui tool open, or if I find the tab ring confusing, sometimes I shunt them to another desktop. Pressing a key combo to switch back and forth isn't any harder than moving my eyes back and forth to another monitor. In fact, I probably wouldn't even bother to plug a second monitor in if I had one. It would just be too much hassle for a laptop user like me.
Because I wouldn't plug it in, I can safely say that it wouldn't increase MY productivity. If forced to use one, the extra few seconds every morning it would take to plug it in, and figure out how to not mess anything up I was already doing so I could ignore it would slightly decrease my productivity, and the BS rule that I had to plug a second monitor in would decrease my morale.
Now let's look at how a study would be done: 1) Get a sample of employees, 2) divide them into a control group who will not get a second monitor, and an experiment group who will, 3) see if the groups' productivities are effected by the second monitor.
The group getting new monitors will contain some people who would benefit from a second monitor and some who would not. The productivity of those people will increase. Hence 'Second Monitors Increase Productivity' is the conclusion drawn.
Maybe other measures would be as effective, or close to as effective, but that isn't looked at. One can't draw the conclusion that 'Second Monitors Are the Best Means To Increase Productivity' or that 'Second Monitors Increase Productivity for Everyone', or that 'Being an Employee Whose Productivity Level is Susceptible to Being Increased By a Second Monitor is A Good Thing.'
However, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that: 'Tools Designed With The EXPECTATION That They Will Only Be Used With a Second JumboTron Monitor Suck'.
There are tons of GUI 'Development' tools that clutter your screen with scroll bars and buttons and lists that take forever to re-draw themselves that probably require a hugeass monitor to use much. Ech.
But for real coding, one monitor is fine. Your code should be 80 columns wide, and if you're using multiple desktops on *nix or VirtuaWin for windows, then when someone calls, you can switch quickly to a new desktop, and then switch back to what you were doing easily enough using only one monitor.
Probably much of the whining is from people not using multiple desktops.
TFA says that American activity would be anonymized until a warrant was issued, and that the system would monitor the activity until the system deemed it suspicious enough for a warrant to be issued, then it would be un-anonymized.
So... How is this different than monitoring people without the anonymization? The chilling effect is the same: You are subjected to increased threat of investigation merely by acting suspiciously where you should have reasonably been able to expect privacy.
You won't search for: 'How to build a kassam rocket' to satisfy your personal curiosity or for that spy novel you were thinking of writing since you don't want the Federales knocking at your door.
Maybe it was going to be a thrilling book, but it never got off the ground, and the world is poorer for it.
3 trillion.... Yeah, Bin Laden won big time by that measure, but even if you only blame 1 trillion on him, or even half a trillion, and blame the rest on Bush's being Bin Laden's tool, ( which is giving Bush too much credit, I mean you need a certain level of competence to be culpable... ) then Bin Laden won BIG TIME.
The thing is, Bin Laden isn't special. There are thousands of them out there. If one Bin Laden can cost America even 1 billion dollars, and each of them do, then America is doomed to play a losing game of Whack-a-Mole.
What about a diagnostic flowchart together with a bag of simple tools.
Is the patient X? If yes, click here, else click here.
Is the patient Y? If yes, click here, else click here.
This wouldn't be great, and I know there is alot of practice and skill in determining exactly what X and Y look like, but it would be better than nothing. Heck, I'd buy one just to have in case of 'TSHTF and there are no doctors'.
Like a Chiltons for the human body. ( Ok, by anyone else but Chiltons - Have you ever tried to understand a Chilton's wiring diagram? SHEESH! Why not a standard electronics diagram? That would at least be decipherable. It's a case of attempting to make it simple actually making it more complicated - welcome to Windows.... )
It would be good if the user could also enter percentage confidence. I'm 60% sure the patient is X, but then again, it's 40% likely given my small to zero level of experience, might be that the patient is not X, so given that, what's my best course of action?
I'm sure things like: Is the patient spurting blood out their frikken neck can be answered by most anyone with 100% confidence, but 'does the patient have a rash that looks like the picture' are more subjective.
There would have to be Peterson's Field Guides-like info of distinguishing characteristics.
Maybe nobody makes this stuff because they are afraid of being sued? Peterson s Field Guides to Edible Wild Plants seems to get away with novices using them to make determinations that could have life and death consequences - Is this a Wild Parsnip, or is it Poison Hemlock?
You are wrong. H1Bs are not low quality developers. However the ability of management to obtain software development at cheaper rates either because of the H1B system enlarging the market of domestic software developers, or throught outright outsourcing, has enabled the higher ups to get a short term boost in 'productivity' at the expense of good software development practice.
Being expensive gives software developers SOME small bit of ability to say no, I don't want to do it this way just because it's quicker now, because it will take me hours and hours and hours in the future to maintain it, fix it, and eventually do it over later, and make future development more time intensive.
Being able to get hours of software developer's time for cheap, means working smart is less of a priority for the higher ups. ( Note this is not the foreign software developers who don't value working smart, it's the higher ups ).
Of course, even with cheap software development available, not working smart will soon lead to software development costs equalling and yes even exceeding previous levels, in much the same way that moore's law has failed to keep computers from being resource strapped. Cheaper resources means they will be used with less regard - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The computer, instead of being a tool that allows few people to perform tasks that would have required millions, each software developer will become able to maintain a smaller and smaller bit of code because the codebase a developer can comprehend is proportional to it's quality until low paid software developers are developing code that does less than ever before!
We'll have ( offshored or whatever ) coders working for less than 'minimum wage' performing tasks using coding and computers that could have been done by hand in the 1940s for less!
Ok, maybe a bit of an exageration but you get the idea.
Motivation... That's the perception of the supposed link between your actions and the benefits of them. (note the link does not have to actually exist to be percieved)
What does IQ have to do with that? If you can clearly see the benefits of an action, and value those benefits, then you will be motivated to act in that way.
In fact, lack of intelligence makes motivation easier to 'harness' by someone else to their ends.
They might even value highly a reward that is not in fact valuable.
We want Rover willing to work for Milk Bones, not dollar bills.
A Dog willing to jump through hoops for pat on the head is even better.
Nobody really wants a smart dog - they're called wolves. If a dog will suffice, then they are vastly preferrable to deal with.
There was this 'IQ test' on a dating site that I took for fun. It was full of questions that had no correct answer. But it also had questions that did have a 'correct' answer. They were tough enough that 'the ones with no correct answer' were impossible ( at least for my ) bullpuckie detector to be 100% sure of.
For example there'd be one of the: What number best completes this sequence? questions.
'best' is kind of fishy. You could pick any number for any of these questions right? I always wondered what made IQ test makers' idea of 'best' better than anyone elses.
Anyway, I decided to cheat. I found a 'table of known mathematical sequences' on the web and discovered that the sample sequence would list a 'known' series, except for one number off. Multiple-choice answers were all there to tempt you to pick one.
Anyway, by cheating ( wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise ) I got the score 100 - Perfectly Average.
I read somewhere that the name 'God Particle' came from a book, where it was originally going to referred to as the 'Goddamn Particle', but that the editor suggested that it be changed.
Mention God and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a swamp. Unfortunately God's strewn it's name throughout the language like a bunch of mines to step on. Try to avoid saying 'God' and you'll sound like Ned Flanders, and everyone will assume you're obsessed with such.
I don't know about you, but there's a nice table of integrals coded into them calculators, and it's a hell of a lot larger than what I've coded into my brain. In fact it's a hell of a lot larger than I EVER intend to code into my brain.
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Bitcoins were at 24.x dollars some days ago, last time I looked they're at 19.x .. Haha.
Why not mine bitcoin2, or bitcoin3, or poopcoins, or whatever? Why are they any less valuable than bitcoins?
There's not even a widely used piece of p2p software that uses bitcoins. If there were, then why should it only accept bitcoins?
E-coins are going to have to be user-mintable. I would place a standing order at an exchange for my coins - call em Gargamailians. ( You can call yours Animats-Bucks )
My 5000 US cents held by the exchange as a standing order to buy 1 Gargamalian for 1 US cent would give my Gargamailians some value in the absence of a Gargamailian economy. I might provide services such as via a p2p protocol - perhaps offer unused hard disk space for a fee payable in Gargamailians. If I have a bunch of hardware, I might create enough demand for Gargamalians ( required to purchase services from me ) to give them substantial value. I would also have unlimited power to mint Gargamalians. If I offered a service you wanted you might offer to exchange 1 of your cents for 1 of mine ( or another exchange rate ). I might eventually trade them for US cents, or another user minted currency.
I might mint a zillion Gargamailians at the expense of their individual purchasing power. But likely nobody would want a Gargamalian except to exchange for a service I provided.
As I provided more and more services, the value of a Gargamailian might rise substantially. If I needed a burst of services from others, then I'd just mint what I needed to pay for it. Only when the value went to near zero would my ability to purchase services by exchanging Gargamalians for other users currencies be curtailed.
This setup spreads minting power over all users.
Smoking is expensive. If it's your lunch break, and you have $5-$8 in your pocket, you are going to choose a pack of smokes rather than the BigMac Combo meal any day.
Any 'I'm going to eat because I am bored' or 'I'm bored and lo-and-behold, it gave me the time to convince myself I was hungry' moments become smoking times instead.
However, I believe the average weight gain for quitting smoking is something like 3 pounds. Not too much.
Yeah, I thought 'The probe is expected to perform exploration at L2' sounded weird.
Er, yup, here we are at L2, uh, look at all the L2-ness around here! Man if I knew there was this much awesomeness at L2, I'd have come here long ago.
Sixteen kilobytes of pure fun.
The mongoose, unfortunately, was really a squirrel...
How the heck did this IDIOT confuse a squirrel with a BIRD????
( Much later I realized this actually makes perfect sense, but at the time, it seemed ridiculous. )
I guess I'm less concerned if a bacteria evolves resistance to bleach, since bleach is useless as a medicine. If I get infected with a sodium hypochlorite resistant bug, then I doubt the doctor was going to prescribe me a tablespoonful of Chlorox for it anyway.
How close are they to being able to tell whether antimatter falls up or down?
I don't buy the idea that men are turned on by women having sex with other men because it's 'how we evolved' idea.
'Cheating wives' is popular, I would guess, with married men because they can fantasize about having an affair with a 'cheating wife' supposing that she will keep the fun secret because she doesn't want to be caught either. Married women can fantasize about being the 'cheating wife'. Unmarried men can suppose that they might have a relatively string-free tryst with a 'cheating wife' who is only out for a little fun, and not have feelings of guilt about it.
All these fantasies are BS, and probably those who enjoy them are mostly aware of it. They are just stories people tell themselves to cast an aura of plausability over the whole fantasy for long enough to attain self inflicted orgasm.
Of course a real 'cheating wife' is probably in an unhappy marriage and might not give a damn if she were caught, and like any other 'other woman' might not have any interest whatsoever in keeping an affair secret. And for unmarried men, a relationship with a 'cheating wife' may easily end up with all the same strings a relationship with another woman would: You or she might fall in love - and then what?
And as for rapish fantasies I think people enjoy them for the same sorts of reasons: Usually two reasonably attractive people of the opposite sex want to have sex with each other, and would were it not for the complications involved with the act, and getting to the point where the act happens.
Rape, in a sexual fantasy is a simple backstory to have in your mind while inflicting an orgasm on yourself. Why would they be so accomodating? Rape. Why is my partner so audacious as to just do X with abandon? Rape. Fantasies about being raped or raping someone cut to the chase quite effectively.
Rape - It works for ducks!
Here in the US, Cellphones are free since they come with your plan, I hear in Europe the phones cost a mint, but the monthly fees are lower. I have no idea what the device ought to cost ( prolly cost them $1.95 in parts ).
The instructions do recommend placing the Ooma before your router so that it can prioritize voice traffic over other traffic to ensure good quality, but I have DSL, and did not follow the instructions. I just connected it like any other device so that Ooma Phone traffic is not prioritized above other traffic. No double NAT for me. I have had no voice quality problems so far after more than a year so I saw no reason to change the way I hooked it up.
I thought this at first too, but they do have other sources of revenue besides selling devices. They offer 'fancy' extras for a fee. Also I believe their operating costs are almost zero.
No, I don't, but then I wouldn't be surprised if it's common. People have all sorts of devices that require broadband internet that aren't 'computers'. Think of Playstations, and Wiis and Roku Netflix players etc. Ooma phones are just one more device like that that uses the internet and isn't a computer.
I have an Ooma phone. Actually it's a device that plugs into my internet router, and into which you can plug regular landline phones.
It's like 15 bucks a *year* for taxes, and you get free calling in the US. No other charges. And you don't need to own a computer to use it. It's not like magic-jack where you need to have your computer running.
I also put 50 bucks in my pre-pay account, so I can use 411, and make international calls. The rates are competitive to skype rates for international calls. AND, you get a real landline phone number and can make calls to landline phone numbers. So instead of messing with a computer, when I want to make an international call, I just pick up the phone and dial. If someone calls me from another country, I tell them I'll call them back since it's cheaper for me than it would be for them.
Now the device is 200 bucks, but it's already paid for itself since I don't pay a telephone bill for a landline. And the call quality = that of any landline I've ever had.
No monthly fee. In a year, it pays for itself, and that's it. What a great deal! If you move, take your Ooma with you, and you KEEP THE SAME PHONE NUMBER no matter where you live, ( unless you want to change it ). Cell phones are nice, but they can be expensive. And if you are required to keep one for work, then having 2 in your pocket is annoying. Ooma is a way to have your OWN phone number forever for minimal money.
Why am I shilling? Because I want others to get a great deal. I don't want Ooma to go out of business because it gives customers such a good deal. ( I have no reason to suppose that it would.... ) For being such a good deal, I'll plug them once in a while.
Messaging client = just a little icon in the corner unless someone's talking to me. Email appears to me as the desktop behind my terminals unless I'm using it. I can see if I have a new message by the pop up notification. RSS? Never used it.
If Chinese culture values science/engineering more than Western culture does coming up though school, then maybe the 'winner' types end up persuing what Chinese society ( which includes the government ) values - i.e. science and engineering.
Where then would the Chinese equivalents of the 'losers and nerds' end up? Maybe other pursuits, possibly the liberal arts.
Of course the 'winners' grow up to be powerful in China as they do elsewhere, it just seems that 'winners' in China do science and engineering more than they do elsewhere probably because they offer relatively more rewards than elsewhere because they are more highly valued by the powers that be, and so everyone else because of the rewards that being valued by the powers that be confers.
You two are both right. The thing is that people live in the cracks. You want libertarian ideals and a government that tramples them sometimes. You want powerful forces played off each other to create cracks where life can take hold.
A system that works perfectly like a machine IS a machine, and as sterile, whether based on logical libertarian or logical authoritarian principles.
If your code is 80 columns wide, then there's no reason to have a terminal window wider than that. I can get 4 80x25 terminals open on a laptop with space left over or I can make one of them a full screen tall. Since my code fits in 80 columns, I have no incentive to make a terminal window wider than 80 columns. Rarely I make two windows a full screen tall to compare them side by side, but usually diff is what I use instead. Also, I try to fit all my ideas into 25 rows - 1 screenful. This is an old programming guideline that I admit to not always following, but I welcome the pain of having to resize my windows to accomodate longer procedures as a constant reminder to refactor my code.
I just have never found it necessary to look at more than 4 terminals of text at once. With alt-tab I can have a web browser and a gui tool open, or if I find the tab ring confusing, sometimes I shunt them to another desktop. Pressing a key combo to switch back and forth isn't any harder than moving my eyes back and forth to another monitor. In fact, I probably wouldn't even bother to plug a second monitor in if I had one. It would just be too much hassle for a laptop user like me.
Because I wouldn't plug it in, I can safely say that it wouldn't increase MY productivity. If forced to use one, the extra few seconds every morning it would take to plug it in, and figure out how to not mess anything up I was already doing so I could ignore it would slightly decrease my productivity, and the BS rule that I had to plug a second monitor in would decrease my morale.
Now let's look at how a study would be done: 1) Get a sample of employees, 2) divide them into a control group who will not get a second monitor, and an experiment group who will, 3) see if the groups' productivities are effected by the second monitor.
The group getting new monitors will contain some people who would benefit from a second monitor and some who would not. The productivity of those people will increase. Hence 'Second Monitors Increase Productivity' is the conclusion drawn.
Maybe other measures would be as effective, or close to as effective, but that isn't looked at. One can't draw the conclusion that 'Second Monitors Are the Best Means To Increase Productivity' or that 'Second Monitors Increase Productivity for Everyone', or that 'Being an Employee Whose Productivity Level is Susceptible to Being Increased By a Second Monitor is A Good Thing.'
However, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that: 'Tools Designed With The EXPECTATION That They Will Only Be Used With a Second JumboTron Monitor Suck'.
There are tons of GUI 'Development' tools that clutter your screen with scroll bars and buttons and lists that take forever to re-draw themselves that probably require a hugeass monitor to use much. Ech.
But for real coding, one monitor is fine. Your code should be 80 columns wide, and if you're using multiple desktops on *nix or VirtuaWin for windows, then when someone calls, you can switch quickly to a new desktop, and then switch back to what you were doing easily enough using only one monitor.
Probably much of the whining is from people not using multiple desktops.
TFA says that American activity would be anonymized until a warrant was issued, and that the system would monitor the activity until the system deemed it suspicious enough for a warrant to be issued, then it would be un-anonymized.
So... How is this different than monitoring people without the anonymization? The chilling effect is the same: You are subjected to increased threat of investigation merely by acting suspiciously where you should have reasonably been able to expect privacy.
You won't search for: 'How to build a kassam rocket' to satisfy your personal curiosity or for that spy novel you were thinking of writing since you don't want the Federales knocking at your door.
Maybe it was going to be a thrilling book, but it never got off the ground, and the world is poorer for it.
3 trillion.... Yeah, Bin Laden won big time by that measure, but even if you only blame 1 trillion on him, or even half a trillion, and blame the rest on Bush's being Bin Laden's tool, ( which is giving Bush too much credit, I mean you need a certain level of competence to be culpable... ) then Bin Laden won BIG TIME.
The thing is, Bin Laden isn't special. There are thousands of them out there. If one Bin Laden can cost America even 1 billion dollars, and each of them do, then America is doomed to play a losing game of Whack-a-Mole.
What about a diagnostic flowchart together with a bag of simple tools.
Is the patient X? If yes, click here, else click here.
Is the patient Y? If yes, click here, else click here.
This wouldn't be great, and I know there is alot of practice and skill in determining exactly what X and Y look like, but it would be better than nothing. Heck, I'd buy one just to have in case of 'TSHTF and there are no doctors'.
Like a Chiltons for the human body. ( Ok, by anyone else but Chiltons - Have you ever tried to understand a Chilton's wiring diagram? SHEESH! Why not a standard electronics diagram? That would at least be decipherable. It's a case of attempting to make it simple actually making it more complicated - welcome to Windows.... )
It would be good if the user could also enter percentage confidence. I'm 60% sure the patient is X, but then again, it's 40% likely given my small to zero level of experience, might be that the patient is not X, so given that, what's my best course of action?
I'm sure things like: Is the patient spurting blood out their frikken neck can be answered by most anyone with 100% confidence, but 'does the patient have a rash that looks like the picture' are more subjective.
There would have to be Peterson's Field Guides-like info of distinguishing characteristics.
Maybe nobody makes this stuff because they are afraid of being sued? Peterson
s Field Guides to Edible Wild Plants seems to get away with novices using them to make determinations that could have life and death consequences - Is this a Wild Parsnip, or is it Poison Hemlock?
You are wrong. H1Bs are not low quality developers. However the ability of management to obtain software development at cheaper rates either because of the H1B system enlarging the market of domestic software developers, or throught outright outsourcing, has enabled the higher ups to get a short term boost in 'productivity' at the expense of good software development practice.
Being expensive gives software developers SOME small bit of ability to say no, I don't want to do it this way just because it's quicker now, because it will take me hours and hours and hours in the future to maintain it, fix it, and eventually do it over later, and make future development more time intensive.
Being able to get hours of software developer's time for cheap, means working smart is less of a priority for the higher ups. ( Note this is not the foreign software developers who don't value working smart, it's the higher ups ).
Of course, even with cheap software development available, not working smart will soon lead to software development costs equalling and yes even exceeding previous levels, in much the same way that moore's law has failed to keep computers from being resource strapped. Cheaper resources means they will be used with less regard - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The computer, instead of being a tool that allows few people to perform tasks that would have required millions, each software developer will become able to maintain a smaller and smaller bit of code because the codebase a developer can comprehend is proportional to it's quality until low paid software developers are developing code that does less than ever before!
We'll have ( offshored or whatever ) coders working for less than 'minimum wage' performing tasks using coding and computers that could have been done by hand in the 1940s for less!
Ok, maybe a bit of an exageration but you get the idea.
Motivation... That's the perception of the supposed link between your actions and the benefits of them. (note the link does not have to actually exist to be percieved)
What does IQ have to do with that? If you can clearly see the benefits of an action, and value those benefits, then you will be motivated to act in that way.
In fact, lack of intelligence makes motivation easier to 'harness' by someone else to their ends.
They might even value highly a reward that is not in fact valuable.
We want Rover willing to work for Milk Bones, not dollar bills.
A Dog willing to jump through hoops for pat on the head is even better.
Nobody really wants a smart dog - they're called wolves. If a dog will suffice, then they are vastly preferrable to deal with.
There was this 'IQ test' on a dating site that I took for fun. It was full of questions that had no correct answer. But it also had questions that did have a 'correct' answer. They were tough enough that 'the ones with no correct answer' were impossible ( at least for my ) bullpuckie detector to be 100% sure of.
For example there'd be one of the: What number best completes this sequence? questions.
'best' is kind of fishy. You could pick any number for any of these questions right? I always wondered what made IQ test makers' idea of 'best' better than anyone elses.
Anyway, I decided to cheat. I found a 'table of known mathematical sequences' on the web and discovered that the sample sequence would list a 'known' series, except for one number off. Multiple-choice answers were all there to tempt you to pick one.
Anyway, by cheating ( wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise ) I got the score 100 - Perfectly Average.
I read somewhere that the name 'God Particle' came from a book, where it was originally going to referred to as the 'Goddamn Particle', but that the editor suggested that it be changed.
Mention God and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a swamp. Unfortunately God's strewn it's name throughout the language like a bunch of mines to step on. Try to avoid saying 'God' and you'll sound like Ned Flanders, and everyone will assume you're obsessed with such.
I don't know about you, but there's a nice table of integrals coded into them calculators, and it's a hell of a lot larger than what I've coded into my brain. In fact it's a hell of a lot larger than I EVER intend to code into my brain.